Quiet
by kalirush
Summary: Sam Winchester used to pray. Someone had to hear his prayers.


The quiet is the worst part.

Hunger is unpleasant, and it took her a while to process it, the first time it happened. It was an embarrassingly long time before she worked out what to do about it. For someone who had spent so long watching humanity, she wishes she'd paid more attention to the details.

She doesn't like cold either. She was wearing a blouse and slacks when she fell, and they were inadequate to the weather. It had been metaphorical cotton, but now, with her grace ripped away, it is thin and insubstantial. Her body shivers, the skin prickling on her arms in an unpleasant way.

But the quiet is the worst part. She was a Watcher, a Recorder. A Listener. She lived for millennia with voices in her ears- the eternal choirs of worship, the susurrus of her brothers' and sisters' voices, and the immortal clamor of desperate or faithful mortality. They had cried out to her, and she had offered them mute songs of comfort. Little enough, and all she had. She had loved her work.

She would never have chosen to fall. She hadn't wanted the world to end when Lucifer rose, but that was as far above her head as the stars to the sea. She had kept her head down when Castiel and Raphael painted Heaven with the burning of angel wings. She had kept to her work when Heaven fractured into a million parts after they were gone. No one wanted to descend into the dusty alcoves of the Watchers. They were tombed in, blind and deaf and alive to a million voices and a million dreams.

And then- it hurts to think on it. She is awake now, eyes open and blinking in the entirely literal sun.

She is lost. If any of her brothers and sisters fell near her, she does not know it. She has no way of knowing it. The silence echoes in her mind, disturbed not at all by the noises of children playing and people talking and car engines growling.

_Please, God, bring Dad back to us. If you're listening. If you care. Just, please, okay? We're hungry, and Dean's really worried. I can tell._

She realizes that she's standing in front of a board covered in tattered notices, humans milling around her and paying her no mind. It's not a prayer she hears; it's a memory. The man who stares at her from the paper on the board did not even offer up that prayer, but the boy he was before that did. The paper says that he is wanted, but it is curled and faded and half-covered in other papers. Forgotten.

She does not forget. She is a Recorder. She remembers everything. But especially him, because everyone in Heaven knows Sam Winchester's name. No one in heaven knew that she was the angel who heard his prayers. No one cared. They read the Record, when they wanted to know what Sam Winchester wanted in the dark and private places of his heart. But they did not hear his voice. She heard all the voices, that chaotic and polyphonic choir of fear and pain. She remembers all the voices. Sam Winchester is the only one she can find right now.

_Please, God, let them forgive me. I don't think even you could make John Winchester change his mind, but maybe Dean? So, please, God, let Dean forgive me. I never wanted them to hate me. I only wanted to live my own life._

No one knows where the Winchesters are. The computers have forgotten them, mostly. She asks at a library, but the librarian- pretty in black and thick-rimmed glasses- cannot help. She is still cold, but mostly only at night. When she sleeps, she dreams of singing.

Sometimes, people stop in their cars and offer to let her in. She doesn't know where she is going, but she always says yes. Once, someone gives her a sweatshirt, and she puts it over her blouse and is not so cold. She feels dirty, but she cannot tell whether it is the literal or metaphysical dirt, and she does not know what to do about it in either case. She has nowhere to go, so she keeps walking.

_Please let me keep going long enough to kill that son-of-a-bitch. Hah. I probably shouldn't say that to God, but it's not like you're going to smite, me is it? Besides, he's a demon, so technically maybe I'm doing Your work. But just please, please let me live long enough to kill the yellow-eyed bastard who killed her. Please, God._

Someone is shouting at her, but it's difficult to pay attention over all the silence in her head. She thinks she wants something, but she doesn't know what. She doesn't have anything except her sweatshirt, so she gives it to him. She'll be cold again, but the cold might also be metaphysical, so it's difficult to tell whether a strictly temporal sweatshirt helps much. It's little enough, but it's all she has.

She keeps walking. She feels hungry most of the time, and it gives her new perspective on prayers. Hungry people pray for food. She would pray too, except that she knows that the Watchers' alcoves are empty. No one is Listening anymore, and a prayer that goes unRecorded might as well not exist.

_Please, God, what am I? No. I think I know. Just, please God, don't let me hurt anyone, okay? Don't let me hurt Dean. Please, God, don't let me hurt Dean. _

She is standing on the edge of nothing when she runs out of places to walk. She isn't hungry anymore. It's not cold. It should be just her and the silence, except the nothing is there, too. It hides itself so she would never have noticed, if she weren't standing in front of it. Since she has nowhere to walk, she sits down.

Eventually, a voice is shouting- _What are you doing here? Who the hell are you?_- but it doesn't penetrate the silence, so she doesn't move. Her body doesn't want to move anyway. It should be hungry, but it isn't.

"What's going on?"Sam Winchester says, and for the first time since she fell, she hears.

She stands and looks at him. "I am Leliel the Watcher," she says. "I Heard your prayers when you were young, and I entered them into the Record."

_Fucking angels,_ someone swears.

"Wait, what?" Sam Winchester asks. "Are you okay? Dean, she doesn't look good."

"I thought you might be kind," she says. "I remembered that."

"I don't know who you are," he says, helplessly.

"I can't hear prayers anymore," she tells him. "And I'm cold again."

She closes her eyes. The silence doesn't hurt so much anymore.


End file.
